Geometrical Featured Voxel Based Urban Structure Recognition and 3-D Mapping for Unmanned Ground Vehicle

Recognition of structures in urban environments is a fundamental ability for unmanned ground vehicles. In this paper we propose the geometrical featured voxel which has not only 3-D coordinates but also the type of geometrical properties of point cloud. Instead of dealing with a huge amount of point cloud collected by range sensors in urban, the proposed voxel can efficiently represent and save 3-D urban structures without loss of geometrical properties. We also provide an urban structure classification algorithm by using the proposed voxel and machine learning techniques. The proposed method enables to recognize urban environments around unmanned ground vehicles quickly. In order to evaluate an ability of the proposed map representation and the urban structure classification algorithm, our vehicle equipped with the sensor system collected range data and pose data in campus and experimental results have been shown in this paper.